“Forty each day for nine days have been beheaded, and now there remains but one, whom my lord the magistrate will have strangled this day.” Then Lok Hing told the hunchback of the one remaining prisoner, an old woman whose crime no one knew. She had been about forty years in prison, and had herself forgotten why she had been placed there, and that Yeh Lok had been so moved at the recital of her wrongs that he had vowed neither to eat nor drink until justice had been done her by suitable strangulation. The hunchback heard the story without any outward emotion, but his heart was heavy within him. He alone knew the old woman’s story. She was his mother. His father had been a notable brigand, and his mother had been seized by the then tao-tai and held as a hostage till the brigand should be caught or slain. To Tao’s father, however, died a natural death at a ripe old age, and now for some years the hunchback had ministered to the material comforts of his remaining parent by sending her food and little luxuries daily in the prison. There was nothing more to be done now, however, as already the procession was approaching along the dusty road with two stout coolies carrying the old woman in a basket slung on a thick bamboo pole. Hastily purchasing some pea-nuts from Lok Hing, the hunchback approached the basket and handed them through its wide meshes to his mother. The old dame received the nuts gratefully, and continued to munch them with evident enjoyment until the final tightening of the string round her neck rendered further deglutition not only unnecessary but impossible. The magistrates, officials, soldiers, and rabble then returned to pursue their several occupations or amusements, and To Tao, with rage in his heart, also departed to his house, where he had long kept a handsome coffin with which to do the last thing properly by his aged parent. This action of To Tao in providing a coffin for the aged prisoner was accounted to him for righteousness, no one being cognisant of the relationship that had existed between the two.